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Starlink and Listener Feedback - Ep 173
231 Plays3 years ago
In this potpourri episode Chris and Paul discuss the practicalities of Chris’s new Starlink setup and some of the great listener feedback from recent episodes, including a home-grown tech project that knocked our socks off.
For rough transcripts of this episode go to Episode 173
Links
- Starlink
- Starlink Coverage Map (unofficial)
- Kill A Watt
- ArcGIS Field Maps
- Wildnote
- Inspiration for Marcus’s Home-Grown RTK and Genealogical Project
- Scholarworks
- Skyhorse Tech
- Deep South Robotics
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 173
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 173.
Upcoming Topics and Listener Highlights
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk about a few things, including Starlink Internet, Paul's final solution for his fieldwork in Iraq next month, and an awesome RTK solution from a listener. Let's get to it.
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how's it going? It's going OK. Really, really busy lately, as always. Lots of projects, some bad family news that we're working through, but also lots of really good feedback on some of our recent episodes that I'd like to talk a little bit about. Yeah. You're back in the country now.
Travel Tales: Cabo San Lucas
00:00:44
Speaker
I am. We spent a week in Cabo San Lucas and never been down there before. For those that don't know where that's at, it's at the far southern tip of the Baja Peninsula, which is the little spit that comes off Mexico just south of San Diego. And it's like if you just kept driving south on the coast from San Diego, you cross the border into Tijuana and then you're on the Baja Peninsula from that point on.
00:01:07
Speaker
It's in the state of SIR, I think, is what it is because the license plates say BCS. It's Baja California, S-U-R. It's a really cool place. Cabo is basically all Canadians and Americans. There's a Costco. There's two Costcos. There was one in Cabo San Jose where we flew into and there's one in Cabo San Lucas. I think there's even a Walmart or something like that.
00:01:31
Speaker
Yeah, but there's a lot of Mexican flair too. We went into town a few times. We were at a resort this time around, but it's a really cool place. I want to possibly spend a lot more time down there. I want to do the California rock art tours to the Baja Pitrograph sites that they go to. I mean, you have to take a donkey, a burro.
00:01:52
Speaker
for many days to get to these things and then many days to get back out. It's just a really, really cool place. It reminds me of the high desert in Nevada or more likely like Arizona because there's cactuses, there's like their own version of like saguaro cactuses. They're a little bit smaller and a little bit different, but it's like a unique species.
00:02:12
Speaker
the difference is they're sitting right on the Pacific Ocean and the south end is kind of on the convergence of the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez. So you get this really nice, like offshore breezes that keep the humidity almost non-existent and the temperatures pretty consistent throughout the year, except for some slightly higher temperatures in the summertime and a little bit of humidity when the rains come in. But otherwise it's such a cool place with a lot of history that I hope to be able to talk about on some of these podcasts coming up in the near future.
00:02:40
Speaker
I was wondering about the history. Is there much archaeology that you're aware of other than that rock art in the area? There has to be, is all I can say. I haven't researched it yet, but we are going back in April for a couple of weeks. And I plan to really dive into that when we go there. And we might be going back there a little more long-term after that at some point. Maybe not this year, but at some point coming up in the future.
00:03:04
Speaker
And it's just such a cool place. And I'm thinking with the pictographs and the difficulty of how to get to those deep in the mountains of the Baja Peninsula. I mean, you don't just travel from like Mexico City to do that, right? So there had to have been people living there. I'm willing to bet it was
00:03:23
Speaker
because of the temperate nature of the area where it's just like nice all the time. Like you don't need a lot of shelter covering and, and I imagine like animals and cactuses and all that kind of stuff, food and things with the sea right there were probably plentiful. And it's probably much like some areas on the California coast where actually finding habitation sites could be a little bit of a problem unless they had like shell mounts and stuff. But
00:03:48
Speaker
I don't actually know. It's something I want to research though and report back on the network.
Starlink Internet for RV Living
00:03:52
Speaker
One of the shows that we have. Cool. Yeah. And I might be doing that from Cabo with a Starlink satellite dish if I can get a Mexican one.
00:04:01
Speaker
That leads us into this first segment on this sort of potpourri episode we've got here, where we've got a bunch of things we're trying to catch up on. I've mentioned probably on this show, I can't think of any time specifically, but being living in an RV, internet is always a problem for us. And one of the
00:04:20
Speaker
solutions to internet. It's not the full solution and it's not the only tool in your internet toolbox, but one of the solutions has been Starlink internet. And while you might be thinking, if you're a traveling archeologist listening to this, you might be thinking, well, what can I do with Starlink? How can I possibly use that?
00:04:38
Speaker
To be honest, you probably can't because if you're living in hotel rooms and stuff, they're more than likely not going to let you put your Starlink dish on the roof and has to be able to point north, which could be a problem if you're in a hotel room. You're not going to run it out the door or something like that. But if you work in the West and you know, there are certain times of the year where you do a lot more camping projects, you do a lot more projects where they just give you cash per diem. And I know people that just go camp on like BLM land. Maybe they have a van or a truck. You see a lot of Toyota Tacomas that are modified for for sleeping in in the back. And
00:05:08
Speaker
If you've got your Starlink dish, now you need AC power to run it, so you might have to do some other upgrades to whatever your mobile situation is. You need some kind of an inverter. This thing only pulls, I don't know what it pulls when it's acquiring, but when it's running, it only pulls about 40 or 50 watts, which really is not that bad. The first generation Starlink, the round one, pulled over 100, and then they came out with gen two of the round one, which was down around 70 or 80 watts, and now we've got, they call it dishy McSquareface.
00:05:35
Speaker
Just the other one was Dishy McFlatface, and this is Dishy McSquareface. It's the square rectangular version, which I guess they just got more efficient with their antenna inside there. It's smaller, it's lighter, and it pulls less watts, but does the same job. I love how with your van life, you know the wattage of everything that you carry along with you.
Power Management in RVs
00:05:57
Speaker
If you follow us on Instagram at Roadster Adventures, R-O-D-S-D-E-R Adventures, that's my wife and I's combined channel for our travels. We've got a segment I want to do a lot more of that it's called, What's the Watts? It's basically super short. We're putting it on our upcoming podcast and some of our videos.
00:06:16
Speaker
for the longer form version of that, but still the longer form is like 30 seconds, right? But for the like Instagram reels version, it's basically looking at something, looking at the panel that shows us the, we have a pretty fancy panel that shows us exactly what we're pulling at any point in time. We shut everything else off and then we turn this one thing on to see what's the startup. Cause a lot of AC appliances have a pretty high startup cost and it might pop your inverter, right? If you don't have a big enough inverter to handle that, like the air conditioning units,
00:06:42
Speaker
have what's called a soft start on them. This is a special thing made just for air conditioning units so they can ramp up slowly because their initial kick on for that compressor will blow every circuit in your house, in your RV. Or even if you've got a van or something like that, all the AC units run basically the same way. Do you have one of those kilowatt devices? Do you know what I'm talking about?
00:07:03
Speaker
I don't think so. It's a little white box that you put in in line between the outlet and whatever you want to plug into it. And it'll tell you the wattage that the device is pulling. So I have one actually I got years ago. I can't remember what project I need it for, but I was curious about something. Yeah. And it's really helpful for seeing things that you wouldn't otherwise notice like all the vampiric power that like your TV set does.
00:07:28
Speaker
Yes. A lot of things have a sneaky soft start. They seem like they're shut down, but they're still drawing power. Those things are extremely useful for pinpointing exactly what is drawing how much in your house. Yeah. We've done a lot of boondocking in the last month and a half, which for those that don't know is basically you're off all services. You have no power, no water in your sewer tanks, your black tank, and your gray tank. When they're full, they're full. You got to go empty them.
00:07:56
Speaker
So, that's boondocking. You're not connected to anything. And we have, as I've mentioned in the past, we've got solar on the roof. We've got lithium down in the bays for the batteries. But still, you need to manage it, especially overnight when you don't have that solar power coming in.
00:08:12
Speaker
we have the ability to turn our inverter into basically charge only mode. We do that just because if we forget to like turn it on in the morning, the inverter, when the sun start coming up, I want it to start bringing in solar power immediately. So don't turn it completely off, but putting it in just charge only drops it down to almost no watts that the, at least the power system is pulling. But when you do that, all your AC appliances turn off. And we've looked at it in the evening, cause I'm sitting here looking at the TV right now and it's got that like red light on it and that red light,
00:08:42
Speaker
pulls a few watts, right? And it's keeping just enough inside that TV where if you turn it on, it comes on relatively quickly. That's why they do that. Otherwise, it takes longer to power up. The microwave, I'm looking at a clock on it. That's pulling a few more watts. And depending on how much power you have on board,
00:09:00
Speaker
how many amp hours of basically energy you have in your batteries. We have 300 amp hours rolling to 600 at the end of March. So that'll help out. But depending on how much you have, I mean, that's just pulling that down slowly, but surely, slowly, but surely. And if in the morning it turns out it's a cloudy day or something like that, you could be in a world of hurt for a workday if you're using things like Starlink all day, stuff like that. But that's another thing you have to factor into. Like if you don't have enough amp hours to leave your inverter on overnight,
00:09:27
Speaker
then you're going to have to shut off your AC, which means you lose your internet overnight as well. And then you don't get your internet back until you turn it on in the morning. So yeah, a lot of things to consider in this lifestyle. Sorry, this is a little sideways from what, but it just reminded me of something. With the Starlink, I thought I saw a headline the other day about a bunch of their satellites going down. Do you know anything about that and did it affect you?
Challenges in Space: Starlink Satellites and Capacity
00:09:54
Speaker
It didn't affect me, and I do know something about that. The story is Starlink wants to have somewhere around, I think, 45,000 satellites in the sky. They're going to be in what they call shells. I think there's four or five shells. Right now, they're basically in shell one and shell two, the closer ones into the planet, where they're basically putting as many satellites up as they can.
00:10:15
Speaker
in different areas. They're focusing on more rural areas. If you live in a big city, you're simply not going to have Starlink. While they want those people as customers, they know they're not giving up their high-speed plug-in internet anytime soon. The more rural areas and places that don't have great internet are where you're more going to find satellite service from Starlink.
00:10:38
Speaker
like lower Canada, southern Canada, all of the United States, except for the big cities and places like that. Mexico has it, like northern Mexico, and then I think it goes all the way over into the UK and some of Europe there. They're filling them out more.
00:10:53
Speaker
That's what they have right now. And there's only about 3000 satellites in the sky from the last thing I heard, which is a lot, but it's not a lot when you're talking about coverage and not only coverage, but capacity, which we'll get to in a minute. But that being said, these satellites are still relatively close together from a space standpoint, from like a being in space standpoint. I mean, I don't think you could see one from the other, but they're still like relatively close together. Well, there was a solar flare and solar flares are relatively
00:11:20
Speaker
They're directed, they're high energy, and they have the ability, and they've done this in the past. There was a famous one, I think, in the late 1800s that shut down New York City and other places, maybe it was early 1900s or something, when electricity was just coming into play. The early telegraph machines, everything went down because of a solar flare, because they couldn't handle it. We have more robust
00:11:41
Speaker
power systems these days that can handle solar flare activity. So you don't hear about that kind of stuff happening, but it is possible if one's directed enough and it hits the right spot. That being said, space is totally subject to solar flares and they lost 40 satellites.
00:11:56
Speaker
40 satellites were completely destroyed in one focused area because the solar flare, again, it comes in with a force. It destroyed 40 satellites and they all basically, if they didn't do it on their own, they'll be de-orbited and burned up in the atmosphere. That's how the satellites die anyway. They're relatively small and that's what they're designed to do. Wow, so destroyed them, not just knocked them offline for a bit, but ruined them.
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah, they're done. Yeah, they got to replace those satellites. So yeah, but I think they're building them in a way that that's kind of the plan, right? The plan is not to send humans up to fix these things because that's really expensive and dangerous. The plan is to just deorbit them and put up another one, right? I mean, I think that's how they're building them. They're not building them for
00:12:41
Speaker
I don't want to say they're not building them to be robust. They're robust enough to be in space and last where they're at, but it's easier just to replace it than it is to fix it. I imagine in the future, we'll have a fleet of robot technicians out there maintaining the Starlink satellites and all the other satellites, but we don't have that yet. It's easier just to let it deorbit and put up another one.
00:13:01
Speaker
So that gets to one of the service issues with Starlink is capacity. And I got a bunch of other stuff to talk about on how to get your Starlink dish, but you know, let's talk about that since we're, since we're kind of in there. This is the big problem we're going to have.
00:13:16
Speaker
you can move your service address anytime you want. Starlink is they've received FCC permission for mobile units like for RVs, boats, and airplanes that will continuously stay connected on a gimbal system. They'll just always stay connected to whatever array they're looking at. And then you can travel with it and have that internet. The real consequence for RVers and probably boaters and stuff is you don't really need it while you're moving per se.
00:13:42
Speaker
But you won't have to change your service. You're just like, wherever you are, you have the internet. You don't have to reset it back up. So the problem right now, though, is because they're still in shells one and two, trying to fill those out across the whole planet. And then they'll start working on shells three, four, and five, which those satellites will start building capacity. So there's only a certain number of dishes that can be connected in a 15 kilometer wide hexagon. That's what
00:14:08
Speaker
the service area is. It's a 15 kilometer wide hexagon. And when you move your service address into that hexagon, it's going to tell you one of two things. It's either going to say that they don't have service in that area yet, so they're just not providing star link there. Or it's going to say, there's no capacity. We're at capacity in this area. We plan to add more later. That's what it's going to say. Or it's just going to, bam, move your service address to there without question. And if it does that, we're leaving where we're at right now in Tucson on Thursday morning.
00:14:37
Speaker
actually Thursday afternoon. But we can't actually try to move our satellite, our Starlink. I don't think we're going to get it. We're going up to Phoenix and I don't think there's service up there anyway, so it's not going to be an issue. But if we were going to a place where we thought we might have service, the minute we move it, we lose it here. We still have the dish. It's still pointing at the sky, but we moved our service address so it will no longer work.
00:14:58
Speaker
So while we're in transition, we can't actually use it. And if we were moving across the country and moving every day, we probably just wouldn't have Starlink as one of our internet options. We'd have to use one of our cell options that we have on board. So that's one of the downsides. Rachel did mention, my wife, she did mention, hey, maybe we should just get two Starlinks.
00:15:19
Speaker
we can move one early to try to get into the cell where we're going. Because again, capacity is an issue, but the people are moving in and out of those. And then we always use one at a time. The two problems with that are, one, you can only have one per account right now. So we'd have to have a whole separate account to do that. And two, it's a hundred dollars a month.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah, that really does add up. You're definitely paying $200 a month, and you're definitely only using one at a time. That's not exactly efficient if you're trying to save money. Now, we use this for business, so it's a business expense as far as paying for the internet goes. It's a write-off, so to speak. It makes sense, but I couldn't justify $200 a month for that. I'm already paying well over that for internet with all our cell networks and stuff, so we're going to start probably getting rid of some of those.
00:16:07
Speaker
Anyway, kind of the nuts and bolts on how the service actually works. I think maybe we'll take a short break right now and we'll come back and I'll just finish up a little bit before we get into our next topic on how you actually get a Starlink dish and what the costs really are, just in case you're interested in that. So let's take this break and we'll talk about it on the other side, back in a minute.
00:16:28
Speaker
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00:17:08
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeotech podcast episode 173. And we're talking Starlink for another few minutes. I just want to talk about the ordering process real quick because it's really frustrating. First off, you have to go to starlink.com. You have to start an account and you have to place an order. That's going to cost you a hundred dollars.
00:17:27
Speaker
It's a refundable deposit. If you choose to cancel your order, they'll give you your $100 back. But it's $100 to put down and then you put in your service address. You have a billing address and you can put in your service address and your service address is what will return the message that I got a year ago when I first put this on my account.
00:17:45
Speaker
I tried Reno. I didn't know anything about it. So I tried Reno and it said, oh, we're targeting service in your area in mid to late 2021 is what it said. I tried a bunch of other addresses of places where I knew I could have it shipped because I thought that's where I needed to send it. And then I could change it because I'd heard you could change your service address, but I didn't really get what that meant. So
00:18:06
Speaker
I was trying my parents' address in Oregon, my grandma's address in Washington, Rachel's family's address in Charlotte. But all those places are in relatively populated areas where they just didn't have Starlink yet. And the service always said mid to late 2021 and then sometimes leading into 2022. Well, when I went to this RVing event last month, the guy was saying, no, just try different random latitude longitude locations on the Starlink map in Wyoming.
00:18:35
Speaker
because that's where they are targeting. And I did that. And I did that like the day that I went to this seminar and all of a sudden I was now shipping in early February, 2022. And that was like three weeks away. And then I got an email actually in the last week of January that said, your Starlink is ready to ship. And when you get the, your Starlink is ready to ship email. First off, it charges you $499 if you accept that, because that's the price of the equipment in addition to that hundred you already paid.
00:19:04
Speaker
You have to pay it. So it's basically $600. So you pay the additional $500 for the dish. And then you have three days, basically, when they send you that email to change your shipping address, which basically means your service address. So then I changed it to where we were in Arizona. And it shipped to us. And then now I'm able to just basically change my service address whenever I want. You can do it unlimited number of times. There's people that are publishing like Google Maps where they all the points where they've gotten Starlink.
00:19:33
Speaker
So you can see these places where it has it. Because Starlink doesn't actually publish where they have service. This is all basically crowdsourced information and people are just trying to figure it out. That's a little frustrating. It is. It is. And I don't know if they're doing that just to stay a little bit mysterious or if they just simply
00:19:50
Speaker
It's a moving target so much that they just, I don't know, they're just not paying attention to it. They obviously know where they have service because when you punch in your service address, it says that. Of course they know because they're satellites, but the fact that they're so black box with the information, the fact that the
00:20:05
Speaker
cells are 15 kilometer wide hexagons is crowdsourced information. People have literally moved the pin around a number of times and mapped it out basically using the coordinates on the really bad Starlink map on the website and then put that onto like a Google maps map or some other, or people are using like GIS for this to actually map out the cells. And that's how we know what shape they are and how big they are and how we know basically where they are and how this all works. So,
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, that is a little frustrating. I think they just want to get to the point where it just works for everybody everywhere, which I get. But for the early adopters, man, they really need some more support.
00:20:45
Speaker
Anyway, so that's the ordering process and the cost speeds. Paul and I were doing some comparison speed tests. I'm a little surprised my speeds are as low as they are. We're right in the middle of a cell from what I can tell. We're in the middle of nowhere outside Tucson, but we're getting 86 download. And this is on my computer connected to wifi. The Starlink router, it actually comes with its own router for an extra cost. You can buy a part that allows you to run Starlink through your own router.
00:21:11
Speaker
But if you don't get that, which we don't have yet, then we're running it through the Starlink router, which is a pretty good router, actually. I don't know a whole lot about it, but it's all the latest bells and whistles as far as routers go. But we're getting 86 megabits per second down and 14 up. But we've seen as high as 230 down and like 60 up.
00:21:28
Speaker
And by comparison, on my cable internet at home, I'm getting 100 down and 10 up. But the big caveat is that both of us are on Wi-Fi. So that last step introduces a lot of variability into these measurements. It would be much better if we were wired directly to our routers and then we could see
00:21:50
Speaker
more realistic or more reliable numbers because as we all know, Wi-Fi is extremely variable to placement of the computer relative to the router and what's in the way and if there's metal in the way and what kind of reflections you have and so on and so forth.
00:22:06
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the thing with the Starlink. You can't actually even plug into the router. It's got one hole in and that's coming from the dish. The rest of it is Wi-Fi out. Yeah. So you have to buy the $40 part or whatever that you actually plug the cable coming in from the dish. And it comes with a 75 foot cable, by the way.
00:22:22
Speaker
So you can put this thing basically wherever you want. We bought a pole that has an upper suction cup and a lower suction cup. So we can basically, we have a 16 feet of pole that we can put anywhere on our RV to get it basically over the RV and up over any obstructions that might be in the way. It needs a view of the Northern sky, which is a little different than most satellite dishes for like TV and stuff, which are all
00:22:45
Speaker
equatorial, so you need a view of the southern sky. With Starlink's focus right now on more rural areas, Starlink needs a more northern focused view of the sky. So if you're thinking about your house, which is where a lot of people are getting Starlink, if you live in a rural area, but you're surrounded by trees,
00:23:02
Speaker
You're going to have to think about where you're going to put that thing if you don't have an unobstructed view of the northern sky. So now you're going to have to get it up high or get it far away from the house. But the router, the dish, everything is completely waterproof. And in fact, the dish has automatic heating on it that will melt off snow and things when it senses snow on the dish. It will actually melt off the snow and do that. And attract cats. And attract cats, I was going to say. That's where the article coming around for that is. That's why the cats don't like the flat one because it's smaller.
00:23:33
Speaker
This, this rectangular one. Yeah. So let me ask you a question about that placement. How finicky is it? Do you have to like get it exactly the proper angle or I've never worried about it and aiming it. I haven't worried about it. You don't have to aim it. You just plug it in and it aims itself. It takes just a couple of minutes. It's like got a motor on it. Oh yeah. Yeah. It'll track right now. It'll track everything. Yeah. So
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, you don't have to aim it. You don't have to do anything. And in fact, people have done tests where they started driving and the satellite will start to track. Now the problem with that, you might think, well, then why can't I use it while I'm driving? Because the motors they have in there are not set up for doing 70 miles an hour down the highway and handling that kind of wind while also tracking satellites. And it's also not designed to hop between cells. You'd have to move your service. So there's lots of things working against you, you know, as far as that goes. And
00:24:24
Speaker
When they come out with their mobile capable one, it's going to be a lot more stable and have more powerful motors to be able to handle those kinds of things. Of course, it'll probably be in a dome or something like that too, so it doesn't have to deal with the wind and stuff a lot, but it's also going to have to be a lot more stable to handle librations and things like that.
00:24:39
Speaker
But no, I put it up on this pole and I generally point it north because I don't want it to work too hard. But it's in stow mode when I take it out of the box, which is basically flat. And then once I plug it in and I take it out of stow mode, it angles itself back up. And then if we're in a completely new space, it might take two or three minutes, but it doesn't take long for it to acquire satellites and go online. So it's pretty quick.
00:25:03
Speaker
Cool. I'll mention one last thing. If you're crossing borders, like I said, Mexico, we might have to get a new one. It doesn't work across borders, like a lot of things. For some reason, it's highly regional. Even though it's the same dish, it's the same everything, you physically have to buy a new dish. You can use your same account, but you have to buy a new dish if you go into Canada or Mexico and expect to use your Starlink. That's really strange to me. I don't know why that is.
00:25:31
Speaker
it is what it is. So it's a whole regulatory government thing probably. It's literally the same piece of equipment, but you have to buy a new one. Now there's plenty, there's a lot of dishes actually on the open market right now. They're going for more than you can get one from Starlink because people are jerks. But I've heard of people RVing in Canada for the summer or something like that. And they got their Starlink up there and then they come to the United States and they sell their Canadian Starlink dish and buy a US Starlink dish just on the open market from somebody else.
00:25:59
Speaker
So, there's definitely a crowd for that. All right. So, for the last part of this podcast and the last part of this segment and segment three, we're going to talk about a really cool email that we got and Paul's preparations for his upcoming projects because they're somewhat related. So, Paul.
00:26:19
Speaker
Yeah, so let me cue that up. Episodes, I think 168 and 170, I was talking about projects that I'm working on, specifically how I was trying to come about with methodology for using mobile GIS for data collection in the field in Iraq. I was chewing with my mouth open. I was mulling over certain ideas, expressing some of the problems and concerns I had.
00:26:42
Speaker
in hope of getting some feedback and yeah wow we got a lot of feedback so actually before i go into what some of that feedback was i just want to put this out there if you're listening to this and you're working on any kind of project that is you know you're gearing up for field season you're gearing up for a
00:26:58
Speaker
for field school, for whatever, and you want to work through some issues, some technical issues. We would love to have you on this podcast and discuss those because I think that there's a lot of value in showing the process, not just the finished product.
00:27:14
Speaker
I really like trying to grapple with the issues that we're having because somebody's always going to come up with some idea that vastly simplifies or vastly complicates, depending on what you've done, what you're working on. And I think that's really good. I think that's really healthy for our field. So anyhow, yeah, so I received some great feedback. I'm just going to briefly mention that
00:27:37
Speaker
In response to my mention of posting the 3D models of the Ziggurad of Ur and the Eddu blah blah, and that I was waiting to get permission for that from the Iraqi Antiquities authorities, I got a very nice email from former interviewee guest on this podcast from a couple years ago, Isaac Ola,
00:27:55
Speaker
And, you know, he was congratulating me, I guess, for taking, you know, the concerns of the Iraqis and waiting, you know, and not just doing this because I could, but actually trying to engage with the Iraqis in the display of some of their own cultural heritage. And he sent me along a link to a YouTube video and a link to, or actually he sent me along a PDF of an article.
00:28:18
Speaker
talking about 3D modeling and community engagement and pipelines for engaging other people so that it isn't just the researchers in their ivory tower doing something because they can, but to try to figure out how to get the various stakeholders involved in the process. And this is, again, this is something very healthy for our field. I would love to have him back on at some point to talk about this.
00:28:40
Speaker
Yeah. But this was a little sideways to what we were talking about. Some of the other things, Wouter, who you just interviewed on the CRM podcast, and that should be coming out soon. I'm looking forward to seeing what he has to say. He's kind of a super commenter on our members-only Slack. And he gave me some very pointed, very good ideas about my own mobile GIS that vastly simplified it.
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah. That's awesome. What I have now for the mobile GIS and this follow-up to that episode is that I've settled on using ArcGIS field maps as the data collection. It took me a while to figure out how to use it. I have a license now because I'm working for the University of Pennsylvania on this project in Lagash. I have a license through Penn and was brought into the ArcGIS world that we have at Penn.
00:29:31
Speaker
and got access to files and such that we had that I previously didn't have access to. I've never used ArcGIS. Well, I used ArcMap like 30 years ago, I think. But I've been using QGIS heavily and I used GRASS quite a bit in my dissertation. So it took me a little bit to get my brain around ArcGIS. I'm still learning it.
00:29:52
Speaker
But it's interesting. Again, to that left-handed scissors, I don't have a preference at the moment between ArcGIS and QGIS. To me, they seem to come at the same set of questions from exactly opposite ways. My impression of QGIS and of GRASS in the past was that it was primarily file-based.
00:30:15
Speaker
a shapefile, you would have a raster, whatever. And then to that you could attach data. And my impression now of ArcGIS is it's more or less inverted. You start with the data from which you produce the maps. I realize this is a vast oversimplification, but I had to step back and
00:30:33
Speaker
figure out that there were a few very minor ways of readjusting my perspective on the software before I could actually use it. Now that I have done that readjustment, I started using it. I found a nice tutorial online that explained how to set up field maps. I started using that.
00:30:50
Speaker
Again, because of Wooter's input and because of them having some free time to play with this, I now have three iPads set up all ready to go, kits with extra cables and battery packs and such.
00:31:04
Speaker
with ArcGIS field maps that hopefully in the field if you go there and you click a button and you choose what kind of the recording it is and it gives you the there's a different color for write-offs and for positive and negative and you
00:31:21
Speaker
click another button to say what time it is when you make that recording and another button to put your name into it and away you go. I'm not even putting down the coordinates or while it's recording the coordinates by GPS, but I'm not even putting down the name of the target location because I realized I could just match that up with nearest neighbors in GIS afterwards.
00:31:40
Speaker
I simplified this as much as possible. The other half of this is how I'm simplifying the processing of the data because we're going to be collecting a lot of whatever is on the surface, which is mostly going to be pot shirts, but it includes shell and slag and any of a number of more specific kind of artifact types. We might find bits of statuary. We might find bits of metal objects. I don't really know until we actually start doing it.
00:32:05
Speaker
But I want to accommodate that. What I ultimately want to do is I want to take these broad categories and do heat maps, so bring them back into the GIS, and also take things that are important on their own right. Say we have a piece of diagnostic pottery, pull that out of the system
00:32:25
Speaker
to hand over to the ceramicist so she can do her work with the tools that she's used to using, but then still have that link back to the original collection location so that we have a trail of the provenience of the objects. Right now, I'm exploring doing that bit in Wild Node.
00:32:41
Speaker
Right, having a very simple form that material or artifact type, by material and artifact type, you go, do, do, do, do, count, wait, count, wait, count, wait. And then if there's something that you want to pull out, there's another subform on there that you click on and say, hey, I'm pulling this object. This will be its artifact ID within the artifact ID system. Here's a photograph. Here's why I'm taking it out of the system. And hopefully we can make
00:33:08
Speaker
you know, it's going to require more brain power to do that processing than it will to do the data collection. But I think that I can get this really honed as a very quick sort of assembly line routine. Nice. Well, that would be really awesome. And it's, it's cool seeing all these like different tools come together, right? So you can actually do something because it's not always just like a,
00:33:33
Speaker
a one-stop shop solution for different things that you want to do. And you have to understand all these tools. That's why I like talking about this stuff on this podcast so people can say, oh, that's a thing I'll use for this. That's a thing I'll use for this. That's a thing I'll use for this. And it's just ideal when we do that. So let's take a break and finish up this discussion on the other side. And we'll end up bringing in another listener that brought in some great information for all of this. And we'll talk about that in a minute.
Innovative RTK Solutions and Community Engagement
00:34:01
Speaker
All right. Welcome back to the final segment of the Architect podcast episode 173. Paul has been basically crowdsourcing a lot of great information through our member services, through past guests that have been talking, which is how you really should do this. Nobody has the answers themselves.
00:34:17
Speaker
But we also got some really cool information from a listener to the show that has done some of his own stuff. And I think Paul's going to introduce that right now. It's a very detailed email with some diagrams and stuff. I think we'll try to include some of his links in these show notes as well, because he's got some pretty good explanations for what he did. Go ahead, Paul.
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah, so this came kind of out of the blue. I wasn't expecting it, but it really brought me great joy to get this email from a listener named Marcus. Basically, he's a hobbyist, a technologist, an amateur genealogist, and it brought me joy because it wasn't directly anything that we're doing, but
00:34:56
Speaker
It was somebody expressing their own creative process and scientific process and cultural historical process and bringing all these together into a space that's very much adjacent to what we like on this podcast. So basically his problem, his project, the issue that he was dealing with was he was trying to do genealogical research on his family and a lot of his family is buried in rural graves that are otherwise unmarked.
00:35:23
Speaker
And so he wanted to map these with a drone, but also he wanted to get precise RTK positions on these graves. And as an avocational researcher, as somebody that was doing this on the side, not writing grants, not doing the stuff like we do, he was doing this strictly as a hobbyist and decided that from what he'd read online, he could roll his own RTK system.
00:35:52
Speaker
I had never even considered this as a possibility, but he sent me a bunch of links and sent me down a rabbit hole for a few days of, yeah, while I had a million other things to do. Thank you very much.
00:36:05
Speaker
of trying to learn about how this all worked. Basically, he was using a couple of U-Blocks development boards and U-Blocks makes a bunch of different GPS chips for hobbyists and for other projects. They usually sell their chips to other companies to roll into products. With these couple of U-Blocks developer boards and software and external antennas and
00:36:34
Speaker
a laptop and a cell phone and such, he rolled his own RTK that he used on this project. And again, I had no idea that this was something even possible. So for under $1,000, he had a system that he had the pride of developing himself, of putting together himself. But then, of course, the generosity to share the ideas, which was really, really cool.
00:37:00
Speaker
I shared that email with you because he sent it to me initially. We were both just kind of floored by the detail of it, but also that, wow, this is stuff that sparks people's interest. I've seen a lot of, because I am kind of adjacent to the makerspace world, I've seen a lot of different projects, but I haven't seen many that just go full in on something that is cultural, historical like this, and technical, and roll your own.
00:37:28
Speaker
I just wanted to share that. I'm going to put links to a couple of the different articles that he shared with us in case any of our listeners want to give this a go. He deserves credit for bringing this to our attention. It did also throw me, like I said, it threw me down a rabbit hole. I decided to do something funny. This isn't RTK at all, but I've got a bunch of Raspberry Pis around. I took one and I got a simple little sub $20 USB GPS receiver.
00:37:55
Speaker
and a little bit of Python scripting and a good capacity battery pack with a built-in solar charger, solar panels. I've decided that when I get to Lagash, which will be next month, I don't even think I'm going to be on another recording before I leave.
00:38:14
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have to work around that. I'm going to mount this on a tripod over the site benchmark and just let it run for two days and collect data and then do a weighted average of all the points based off of their dilution precision. I mean, I realize this is extremely naive the way that I'm going about it, but I'm just curious what two days of data collection with the GPS is going to look like and how accurately I can find our
00:38:40
Speaker
I mean, in my experimenting at home, after even half an hour, it zeros in very, very accurately, at least in the horizontal on where I've left it as compared to Google Earth images. So, again, thanks to Marcus, not just for sharing his thing, but then for sparking this other idea.
00:38:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. I love when we get interaction from listeners like that, and we'll definitely include some of the links that Marcus sent over to us. He had some inspiration from a paper he read, and he also sent us some diagrams of his setup, which is just really, really cool and well thought out. It's very awesome. Yeah. I wish I had his level of tech ingenuity and expertise.
00:39:27
Speaker
What else can I say? I was floored. It's really cool. It's neat. This leads to what we were mentioning at the beginning of the show, and we mentioned on a couple of past shows, and I've actually posted this on a few social media sites for the APN.
00:39:42
Speaker
We want people to come in and tell us what their tech challenges coming up on a project are, or maybe if you know what your solution is or you think you know what your solution is for an upcoming project, come onto the show, bear all to the audience and to Paul and I and say, hey, this is what we are doing on this project, this is what we're trying to accomplish, and this is what we're using to
00:40:04
Speaker
do that. Or if you don't really know fully what you're using to do that, maybe there's some holes in your process. Maybe we can help fill those out with just our knowledge, or we can have a listener help out because our listeners have a lot of knowledge about this stuff. No, absolutely. They are far smarter than me and probably me too. Yeah, definitely.
00:40:28
Speaker
All right. I wonder if Starlink works over in Iraq, because it'd be a good thing to have over there for that high-speed internet right there. But you said internet wasn't too much of an issue for you guys, at least where you were staying, right? Yeah. We had internet at the house, and we've got decent cell coverage. So mobile internet on our phones works. Sure. It's not great. And the power isn't great, so the house internet drops out whenever the power drops out.
00:40:57
Speaker
But it's much better than I would have expected. And that's good because a lot of what I'm going to be doing is dependent at least some extent on having internet for at least part of the day. Yeah, yeah, indeed. All right. Well, I think that about wraps up these topics for this podcast. Again, let us know. And hey, it sounds like I need to do some interviews for the next month. So if you do anything cool,
00:41:23
Speaker
me since Paul's going to be in Iraq. I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about when he gets back from there, but contact me, chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com, and let's just chat about the fun things that you're doing. You may not even think that it's a heavy tech
00:41:38
Speaker
project or something like that, but every project these days has a pretty heavy tech element. It would be fun just to talk about the process, what you're doing, and you may think you're not doing anything special, but you might inspire somebody else to do something based on what you're doing because maybe they didn't think about it because we can't all think of everything. As we've been shown time and time again by our listeners and other people commenting on the show,
00:42:02
Speaker
You know, we don't have all the options. You don't have all the options, all the ideas, all the ways that you could do something. And it's nice to just hear about that and get it out there. So with a lot of projects starting up here in the spring and people starting to plan for that, let's have that discussion, chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com. And happy to tell anybody about my Starlink experiences in more detail if you want more information.
00:42:27
Speaker
I guess it's a little black box from Starlink. All right. Well, Paul, any final thoughts on all this stuff? Not at the moment, but I'm sure I will, because again, this has been a lot of fun getting this feedback. Yeah, we do get feedback, but this was just a good
00:42:42
Speaker
bolus injection of different great ideas that bounce around in different directions and have kept me distracted from all the things I need to be doing, but joyfully so. So it's great. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks. And if we don't hear from you on the podcast again before you get back from Iraq, have a good time there.
00:43:01
Speaker
And as I said, I'm sure we'll be able to talk about all the successes and hopefully not too many failures, but there's always a few, you know, some things work, some things don't. And it's always a little bit of an experiment, but I'm sure it's going to be an interesting experience either way. So thanks everybody. And we'll see you next time. Take care.
00:43:25
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash Archeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:43:50
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.